THE ESSENTIALS OF DEMOCRACY

Note: All of the journalists pictured here are staunch critics of the non-democratic tactics of the current Argentine government. Only by defending their right to dissent, no matter what our own political or philosophical positions might be, can we defend and protect our own democratic, civil and human rights. ﻿

As I reflected on the subject of this editorial essay, researching and
poring over the events of the past several weeks, I reached the conclusion that
perhaps the most succinct truth at which one could arrive is that the time for
fearing that Argentina might be
headed for the de facto establishment
of a “popular” dictatorship may be over. Whether anyone wants to admit it or
not, in recent weeks we have witnessed clear signs of the impending demise of
democracy in the thirtieth anniversary year of its reestablishment by the hand
of President Raúl Alfonsín, the first and, arguably, last genuine democrat to
lead Argentina following more than seven years of murderous military rule from
the mid-seventies through the early eighties.

Jorge Lanata, shocking revelations.

Clearly, democracy was undermined with the Constitutional Reform
introduced by the government of Peronist Carlos Menem, which, despite any
beneficial amendments introduced, was all about the illegitimate re-election of
the former president, a move that allowed him to remain in power for a full decade—ten
years steeped in corruption and marked by scandal, and by botched and fixed
privatizations and sellouts that cost the country dearly. And it is clear too
that a politically manipulated popular coup that toppled his successor—Radical
Party leader and former Buenos Aires Mayor Fernando de la Rúa—further
undermined democracy by demonstrating that even a leader from a normally
ultra-democratic Radical Party was capable of confiscating the private property
(and life savings) of the country’s population, that certain sectors of Peronism weren’t above exploiting
and encouraging chaos and insurrection in order to keep any other legitimately
elected party from remaining in office and that the vast majority of Argentines
were still willing to stand by and do nothing when violence and de facto tactics were employed to wrest
power from the hands of a legally elected administration.

Democracy also trembled and quaked to its foundations in the chaotic
game of musical chairs that followed the De la Rúa government’s fall. Since in
the midst of the political and financial crisis with which the Radical
administration was faced Vice President Carlos “Chacho” Alvarez had resigned
before the final break-up, once ousted, De la Rúa was first repla

Nelson Castro, criticism with class.

ced by Senate
President and opposition Peronist politician Ramón Puerta, on December 20,
2001. Just three days later, in circumstances that were less than clear to the
public at large, San Luis Governor and Peronist politician Adolfo Rodríguez Saá
was appointed by Congress to replace Puerta. But that ill-fated presidency only
lasted a week, with Rodríguez Saá citing “lack of political support” for his
resignation, which he tendered on December 30. Puerta was asked to step in
temporarily once again, but this time refused. So, Rodríguez Saá was ultimately
replaced by Lower House President (and Peronist politician) Eduardo Camaño, who
convened a special session of Congress to elect a new president. It was thus
that, on January 2, 2002, the presidential sash was placed over the shoulder of
Peronist leader and former Buenos Aires Governor Eduardo Duhalde—the self-same
Peronist candidate who had lost the presidential elections to De la Rúa in
1999.

Duhalde served out the rest of what should have been De la Rúa’s term—a
little over fifteen months—and called early elections in September of 2003. He
himself was not in the running but remained a heavyweight figure in the
Peronist Party and his backing was bound to give a major boost to whomever he
chose as his favorite to win the elections. Well-known and popular former
race-driver and long-time Santa Fe Governor Carlos Reutemann was Duhalde’s
first choice, but turned his Peronist colleague down. In the midst of a still
confusing and hostile political climate following the 2001 political debacle,
Duhalde was looking for someone either highly popular or largely unknown as his
heir. After Reutemann said no, his choice fell to Néstor Kirchner, whose less
than savory reputation was a matter of record in the deep Patagonian south, but
who, as the obscure governor of the sparsely-populated Santa Cruz Province was
a political unknown in much of the rest of the country. ﻿

Luis Majul, tireless investigator of the man he
called "The Owner"

Of the five candidates—in addition to Kirchner, former President Carlos
Menem, economist Ricardo López Murphy, former President-for-a-week Adolfo
Rodríguez Saá, and anti-corruption crusader and Congresswoman Elisa
Carrió—Kirchner came in second to Menem with a scant 22 percent of the vote
compared with Menem’s 24 percent. Neither of the leading candidates had enough
votes to win without second-round voting, but fearing defeat in the run-off,
Menem dropped out of the race, thus permitting Kirchner to win by default and
by the skin of his teeth, as perhaps the least voted-for president in the country’s
history. And so began what has become known as the Kirchner era.

While Néstor Kirchner sought, in his four-year term, to give at least
the impression of serious government, maintaining renowned and internationally
respected technocrats like Roberto Lavagna and Martín Redrado in key economic
cabinet positions, and tending to respect their advice, international experience
and authority, as well as winning liberal praise at home and abroad by
rescinding laws introduced by Alfonsín and Menem to protect all but the highest
ranking officers of the military dictatorship from prosecution, it has since become fairly clear that his ulterior
motive was to create a political empire in which he and his wife and current
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner would attempt to pass the
administration back and forth between them indefinitely, with the help of
populist measures, an acquiescent opposition and an increasingly loyal
following within the Peronist movement. It has also become fairly clear,
through detailed investigations carried out by journalist Jorge Lanata and
other reporters, that the Kirchners have sought to reconstruct the same corrupt
boss-rule model of government on a national scale that made them all-powerful
and untouchable in Santa Cruz Province. Lanata’s meticulous probe has shown
just how deep-reaching this kind of corruption has been and the huge price the
country’s citizens have paid—among other things, in vastly overpriced public
works and the kickbacks that they have engendered, in currency-by-the-bale
spirited out of the country in money laundering operations, in expropriation
scams and fixed public tenders, in juggled statistics and outright prevarication
to try and belie the economic devastation that such practices have wreaked, etc.

Far from reining the government in and forcing it to conform to the
dictates of democratic government and the rule of law, revelations of
corruption in high places and ever more vocal criticism in the press and
through massive anti-government demonstrations seem only to have emboldened
President Cristina Kirchner, her zealously accommodating ministers and
secretaries and members of the quasi-fascist-model youth movement called “La Cámpora”—led by the Kirchners’ son,
Máximo—whose members the President is reported to refer to as “my little
soldiers” and which has infiltrated every level of government bureaucracy. It
is as if, faced with the revelations of corruption and abuse of power
demonstrated by some of the country’s top reporters, Mrs. Kirchner and her
cohorts have been somehow liberated, and are bent on demonstrating that they
have no sense of shame whatsoever.

Alfredo Leuco, blunt critical analysis

On the contrary, it would appear that, now that the jig is up, in terms
of the scandalous revelations of private investigations that have emerged in
recent weeks, the Kirchner government as a whole and President Kirchner in
particular, are set on showing just how autocratic and uncompromising they can
be. Nor is this surprising, since the President and her circle are born of a
bastardized political philosophy that emerges from a volatile mix of the callous
disregard for democratic principles often demonstrated by her party’s founder,
General Juan Domingo Perón, and the terrorist gang philosophy of the 1970s
neo-fascist Montoneros guerrilla organization—to which Cristina Kirchner has
claimed to have belonged, despite this claim’s having proven more wishful
thinking and fantasy than fact.

Joaquín Morales Solás, meticulous editorial logic.

In regard to this last, more “Monto-never” than Montonera, back in those
days, Cristina and her husband are widely and convincingly reported to have
already been busy building their power base and fortune as intermediaries in
foreclosure operations handled through their Santa Cruz law offices, in
connection with the now infamous Central Bank Circular 1050. This measure was
introduced by the military government that overthrew President Isabel Perón in
1976, and pegged mortgage loans to the dollar-peso exchange rate, which,
following a sharp peso devaluation in the latter years of the regime, resulted
in such soaring increases in loan payments that people all over the country
were forced to hand their homes over to key banks and realtors. In other words,
far from fighting the military—despite their alleged Peronist Youth
membership—it would appear that the Kirchners knew precisely how to make peace
with the regime and their consciences, exploit that dark era and use the
dictatorship to stunning advantage in accumulating a sound base for their
eventually vast fortune.

Perhaps this early bent for “ethical flexibility,” accommodation in
benefit of personal gain and hypocrisy for the purposes of political and
economic expediency explains a great deal about how a ten-year-long
administration that has founded its now waning popularity on relatively meager
social handouts and a reputation for being the paladin of Argentine human
rights stands accused of some of the worst and most all-pervasive corruption
and abuse of power since the fall of the former ‘Proceso’ dictatorship. The extent of the de facto power that this government has gained was patent this past
week in ever stronger rumors of plans by Kirchnerists to stage a hostile takeover
of the major multimedia group (Clarín)
that is currently partnering with Lanata. And more telling still is Lanata’s
apparent fear that the government has so manipulated the law that it could
actually get away with such a takeover, thus silencing the principal medium
against advancing Kirchnerism and gagging the journalists whose investigations
have established proof of corruption and abuse of power at the highest levels. Lanata’s
worst fears were clear in a plea he made to his enormous viewing audience at
the end of his show, Periodismo para
Todos a week ago: "I want to
ask a favor of all of you,” he said. “I want to ask you to do something. If
this happens [the silencing of Clarín],
if they wipe us out with a signature from one day to the next, do something! Don’t just let it happen.
And I’m not asking that you do something for me. I’m asking you to do it for yourselves!”

I couldn’t agree more and add a request of my own to anyone who reads
this. Don’t just keep accepting corruption and abuse in Argentina as
inevitable. Don’t keep considering uncompromising professionals like Lanata
(Nelson Castro, Joaquín Morales Solá, Alfredo Leuco, Luis Majul, et al) to be
naïve, self-interested, crazy or all three. Don’t keep thinking there’s nothing
you can do, that it’ll all go away on its own, or that whatever the government
does doesn’t affect you personally (all you have to do is go to the supermarket
and witness week to week inflation or try to buy dollars to save a little of
your purchasing power from devastation in order to know that’s not true).
Remember that the ruling party feels empowered by your apathy, that the
traditional opposition is as acquiescent as it is because it doesn’t feel your
hot breath on the back of its neck, that new reformist movements don’t emerge to
cleanse the political scene because they find no backing among a self-defeating
people, that corruption is always eventually found out but that silence is what
allows it to continue, that a free press is only possible when a free-thinking
people insists upon it, that freedom of expression isn’t a privilege but a
right and that demanding it, exercising it and fighting for it is the only way
to maintain it, and that without it, there can be no democracy.

Democracy is a state not unlike pregnancy or life itself. It exists or
it doesn’t. There is no such thing as “somewhat democratic” and being
democratic means playing within certain rules, not bending the law to fit
whatever party or ruler happens to be in power, respecting and zealously
upholding checks and balances and the three branches of government, honoring
and defending the position of the minority even when it is diametrically
opposed to your own, and defending freedom of expression and of the press as a
means of safeguarding democracy from tyranny.

Tyranny and censorship are mutually self-sustaining and if enough people
do nothing to take part in, protest for and defend by all means necessary the
search for truth and justice, then they can only blame themselves for having
the autocratic rulers and the power-fawning media that they deserve.

7 comments:

For a very long time, I had asked myself what else can we do? Of late, in keeping with your call for awareness, I no longer keep silent, whenever I hear bits and pieces of the K legend. As calmly as I can express myself, I proceed to point out why I do not agree. We have been silent for so long, these people have come to believe they have no opposition. We can, should, must, rectify this notion.

Hi Dan!I like your essays because they make me think up new questions that you'll surely answer clearly.What do you think of Macri's latest move on the chessboard of democracy for Argentina? I never voted for Macri as governor of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (I usually vote for the "good socialism" now represented, hopefully, by the FAP), but still I presume Macri's successful 30-day bid for independent judiciary powers is a welcome and surprising last-minute "illumination" amidst his partying with the elite and his frightful attempts at dancing!! This is a serious question ;-) I hope some other governors will dare to follow suit, risking KK's immediate cut-off of funds for their provinces. I honestly think Kris is in trouble, and that maybe we're not doomed yet (excepting outright election fraud, which I know is already being taken care of by the Cámpora)Cheers, Sylvia

First Sylvia, many thanks for continuing to be an assiduous reader of this blog.As far as Macri goes, I'm not really a fan of his. I recall all too well his family's ties to both Peronist and 'Proceso' government-linked big business, and it's not as if he never had anything to do with his father's empire, which goes back to the early days of Juan Domingo Perón, because he did as a second-generation SOCMA executive. Furthermore, his record as mayor has been patchy at best (and insensitive and quasi-authoritarian at worst). Nor has he proven very effective in standing up to the KK regime, which has effectively cut him off at the knees ever since Cristina laid hands on the presidential sash and staff.That said, however,yes, his "illumination" with regard to an independent judiciary is indeed surprising and welcome (considering the power that the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires wields). I also believe that he is clearly more structured and respectful of both the democratic and due processes and would surely show greater respect for the Constitution, checks and balances and división of powers than the current government--which respects absolutely nothing except its own verticality and absolute power--and I can safely say that were I Argentine, able to vote, and the only choice was between Macri and Cristina Forever, I would surely bite the bullet and vote for Macri (as I would also probably vote for Daffy Duck or Batman, if they were the only other choice)...But hopefully that won't be the only viable option.

Thank you, Julio, for your kind words and for bothering to read this blog. You might also enjoy some of the work in my literary blog, The Southern Yankee: A Writer's Log, http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.comI send you my best regards and hope you'll become a regular reader.

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Ohio-born Dan Newland has lived, traveled and worked in South America since 1973.
Besides free-lancing for major US and British publications, he was a reporter, editor and commentator for 13 years with the Buenos Aires Herald, a daily renowned for its valiant human rights campaign during Argentina’s bloody era of military rule. Newland is now a free-lance writer, editor, translator and ghost.